The Prevent Duty in Primary Education: A Comparative Study

In 2015, the Prevent Duty (HM Government, 2015) placed a legal requirement on educational institutions to show ‘due regard’ to the need to prevent young people from being drawn into extremism or terrorism. Following this, training programmes were created so that teachers could fulfil this responsibility. In this study, primary school teachers’ experiences and opinions on the Prevent Duty are compared between two different schools in the same metropolitan council. The first school is situated in a community in which most people living there are Muslim; the second school is situated within a predominantly white, middle-class, non-Muslim community. Teachers were interviewed in semi-structured interviews about their experiences of the Prevent Duty, its training programmes and how relevant they considered it to be for the children they teach in their setting. Their responses to these questions are compared to identify any differences on attitudes towards the Prevent Duty between the two areas. Findings suggest that the way in which the Prevent Duty is viewed by teachers, including the importance they place on it, their experiences of the training programmes and how relevant they see it as being to the children in their setting differs between the two areas